I just missed any possibility of meeting Marsha Johnson in person by a matter of hours, but, in a sense, we formed a loose, posthumous bond.

Due to a series of errors in judgment centered around a classic case of unrequited love, I spent part of the summer of 1992 in Greenwich Village in New York. I had arrived the day after the body of Marsha Johnson had been found in the Hudson River, and I somehow ended up as the unofficial caretaker of the make-shift shrine in her honor that was lowly being assembled, piece by piece, on the spot where Marsha’s body lie when she was removed from the Hudson River near what was left of the piers at the end of Christopher Street.

The shrine wasn’t anything fancy. There were those tall church candles with pictures of the Madonna stuck to their glass containers, flowers, little rainbow items of no intrinsic value, although their value came from their being placed there, and forty ounce beer bottles with varying amounts of contents placed there by the young members of the GLBT Community who gathered in the area each night, and who poured out a little of the beer as a tribute before adding the bottle to the shrine.

My caretaking began when I was sitting on a bench at the end of Christopher Street and some kids, apparently unaware of the reason for the memorial collection, or just being jerks, kicked the bottles around as they ran along the Hudson River walk, spreading the contents of the shrine. I gathered up all that was there and reassemble it to the best of my recollection, and was seen doing that by a good friend of Marsha’s to whom her ashes had been given and which he was storing in his antique shop just around the corner from Christopher street until her funeral.

He thanked me for this small act, and, after introducing me to some other people he was with, we went to his shop where he and the others told me about their friend Marsha, and the role she had played in the Stonewall Riot and her work for homeless youth after.

One of the people in the shop handed me a small plastic bag containing some pink powdery substance and then introduced me to Marsha whose ashes I was holding.

According to Marsha’s friends, her standout role the night of the Stonewall Riot was her pulling people out of the police wagon as soon as the officers, who had just put a person in it, went to get another person, so that when they returned the wagon was empty. This action frustrated the arresting officers that resulted in Sergeant Pine’s sending the wagon away as it was obviously becoming a focal point.

They told me that her hating the water and always avoiding getting too close to the railing on the river walk led them to believe that what the police were content to call a suicide was more likely a murder, not just because there were many ways to commit suicide that would have not required her going to the water which she hated, but as the back of her head had been severely stove in, had she jumped and hit a submerged piling from an abandoned pier, as the police believed, the force would not have been strong enough to cause the amount of damage that a blow from behind with a blunt object would have

When New York City decided to clean up the walk along the Hudson river to make it more attractive to tourists, pedestrians, and cyclists, Marsha  was asked what her monument would be if there were to be one. She responded that, in light of her life and appearance, she would like a statue that incorporated her as Malcolm and as Marsha done in such a way as passersby would have to ask, ”what the hell is that?”, and perhaps those words could be cast on a plaque on the statue’s base.
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On the day of her funeral, there was a procession from the church to the Hudson, and I was in the gathering by the spot where she had supposedly jumped. The walkway was about ten feet above the river at the top of a concrete retaining wall, and after some prayers, as the presiding clergyman tried to scatter her ashes into the water, the wind rose up from the river, deflected off the wall blowing the ashes up into the crowd so that we, and not the river’s surface, were covered in Marsha’s ashes.

The detective who had been on duty the night of Marsha’s death was standing at the back of the gathering, and in that off-beat dry Gay humor, as the crowd turned toward him, someone yelled, “See? It had to be murder. She won’t even go into the water now.”

I spent the rest of that summer taking care of the shrine and hearing more stories about Marsha.

The cause of death was changed from suicide to undetermined, and in later years the investigation into her death began.

When I ended up in Oklahoma and began my advocacy for GLBT students in the Oklahoma City Schools, considering her work with homeless GLBT kids in The Village, Marsha was often on my mind.

That is why I am interested in attending, and would suggest any local GLBT people, especially the young people who need to learn the real history of events, attend the screening of the new documentary from Academy-Award nominated documentary filmmaker David France THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON, at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park visitor center on Friday, November 17, 2017 at 6pm.

It is free to the public and will be held at The Corson Building, which is the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park’s Visitor Center.

If you are not from the area, I would recommend people attend any showing of this documentary.

History of the Stonewall Rebellion and the stories of those who were there have morphed a little over time, usually more to match people’s need to have things they way they want them as opposed the way things were, and this would be good for those who need to separate fact from myth when it comes to this historical figure.